Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on October 20, 2003 at 19:09:00 from 195.93.32.7 user ACB.
In Reply to: Re: inspiration for posted by Peter Ceresole on October 20, 2003 at 18:48:44:
I wonder if Johnathan may be right in a narrower sense, though? I mean the sense in which we can sometimes identify the unconscious origin of a phrase in a written work.
We can be fairly confident about the origins of, say, some images in poems by Keats. For example, "Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards" in the Ode to a Nightingale comes from Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, which we know Keats saw, because he mentions it.
We know that AR was very familiar with The Riddle of The Sands, and it seems reasonable to speculate that AR lifted the word "duffer" from this passage, probably unconsciously.
There were far fewer sailing books, then, and literary yachtsmen, of which AR was most certainly an example, would have read and re-read most of them.
The Riddle was perhaps the most widely read of all.